200 FOOT-PATHS. 



lish landscape is like a park, and is so thoroughly ru- 

 ral and mellow and bosky that the temptation to walk 

 amid its scenes is ever present to one. In compari- 

 son, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has not 

 that maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of 

 man, runs to briers and weeds or to naked sterility. 



Then, as a people the English are a private, do- 

 mestic, homely folk, they dislike publicity, dislike the 

 highway, dislike noise, and love to feel the grass 

 under their feet. They have a genius for lanes and 

 foot-paths ; one might almost say they invented them. 

 The charm of them is in their books ; their rural 

 poetry is modeled upon them. How much of Words- 

 worth's poetry is the poetry of pedestrianism ! A 

 foot-path is sacred in England ; the king himself can- 

 not close one ; the courts recognize them as some- 

 thing quite as important and inviolable as the high- 

 way. 



A foot-path is of slow growth, and it is a wild, shy , 

 thing that is easily scared away. The plow must re- 

 spect it, and the fence or hedge make way for it. It 

 requires a settled state of things^ unchanging habits 

 / among the people, and long tenure of the land ; the 

 rill of life that finds its way there must have a peren- 

 nial source and flow there to-morrow and the next 

 day and the next century. 



When I was a youth and went to school with my 

 brothers we had a foot-path a mile long. On going 

 from home after leaving the highway there was a de- 

 scent through a meadow, then through a large maplo 



